An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (25 page)

“I don't know,” I said. “I was just looking around.”

“Find anything interesting?” she said. She was working on a section of tulips.

“This is pretty interesting,” I said.

“I always paint a garden in a new house. Always,” she said.

I nodded. I was thinking about birds, how their bills developed depending on the food they ate. The shrike, the cardinal, the wood thrush, the crossbill, the yellow throat were all in the same family, yet their bills all looked different.

Mrs. Bishop looked up then and smiled. Her teeth were
horsey and big, but they only added to her unique look. “I guess we should see what's cooking, hmmm?”

My mother would have showered and primped before joining her guests. But Mrs. Bishop didn't bother. She stayed in her paint splattered clothes, her hair in a messy ponytail, without even bothering to put on shoes. When we walked into the kitchen, my mother smiled her Queen Elizabeth smile.

“Babe,” she said. “I was wondering where you were.”

My father sat at the table eating olives and looking miserable.

“Upstairs,” Mrs. Bishop said.

“She'll have to show you her masterpiece sometime,” Mr. Bishop said.

I wanted to say that it was beautiful. But something stopped me. Perhaps it was the way Mr. Bishop had said the word
masterpiece
. Or the way my mother smiled when he did. Or maybe it was just the air in the kitchen that night, which seemed oddly charged, the way the air feels just before a cold front moves in.

O
NE DAY TO
my tonsillectomy and I spiked a fever during School Meeting. In School Meeting, all the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders sat on colorful cushions in the Activity Room and aired our feelings. Susan Markowitz wanted to talk about male chauvinism, how the boys dominated certain areas of the school. Trini Randall wanted to discuss changing the morning snack from peanut butter and crackers to fruit and nuts. Fiona Bishop used her red cushion as a pillow, stretched out with her head on it, and went to sleep.

I raised my hand.

“Alice?” said Bob, my literature teacher.

“My throat hurts. It feels like I have razor blades in it.”

The health teacher, Patty, came over to me and touched my forehead with her large cool hand. “You have a temperature,” she said. “Do you want me to call your mom?”

“I'll just go home by myself,” I said.

“Do you want Trini to walk with you?”

I shook my head. As I gathered my things, I heard Felix Crawley saying that the school should write a letter to the president about the MIAs. Once, at a Saturday night dinner at the Crawleys', I had let Felix French-kiss me. Now his voice made me nauseated. His tongue had felt cold and slimy and ever since I had hated him. With my head hurting and my throat sore, I practically ran out of there and the six blocks home, past the bodega with its weird chicken smells and the Irish bar with its stale beer smell and the head shop with its strong incense and B.O. smell. Finally I was home and all I could think of was a blue Popsicle and TV game shows.

But when I pushed into the kitchen I found my mother and Mr. Bishop eating Chinese food and drinking my father's Heineken.

“Oh, no,” my mother said when she saw me. “Not your throat.”

She had a smear of brown sauce on her cheek, as if she'd been sticking her whole face in the white cartons of food. When she reached her hand out to touch my forehead, I pulled away.

“What's the matter with her throat?” Mr. Bishop said. He was eating the food with long green chopsticks, and they hung in the air like daggers.

“It's her tonsils,” my mother said, exasperated. “She was supposed to finally have them out tomorrow but they can't operate if they're infected.” She stood up and sighed. “I'll have to call Dr. Williams again and cancel. Get you some antibiotics.”

Mr. Bishop took hold of her wrist. “Phoebe, don't you know that antibiotics are poisoning us? Really they are. Soon they won't even work anymore and new mutant bacteria will kill us all.”

She sat back down. He didn't let go of her wrist. “Do you know about the Bach Flower Remedies?”

My mother shook her head. The way she looked at Mr. Bishop made me uncomfortable, like I shouldn't be there. I rummaged in the freezer for a stray Popsicle.

“Dr. Edward Bach discovered them in England in the thirties. Thirty-eight different flowers for various characteristics and emotions. Let me bring some by for Alice tomorrow.”

“We're out of Popsicles,” I said.

“Yes, bring them,” my mother said. “You're absolutely right. The antibiotics aren't doing a thing.”

E
VERY DAY FOR
a week Mr. Bishop arrived at one o'clock with a combination of cherry plum, clematis, impatiens, rock rose, and star of Bethlehem in a vial with an eye dropper. He placed four drops on my tongue while I glared at him through my feverish eyes. “I need medicine,” I croaked, my throat worse every day.

After he left I propped my pillows up so I could watch
the mother robin feeding her newly hatched babies. They were ugly, those babies, like Martians. But she tended them carefully, bringing them worms and bugs to eat, flapping her wings whenever she arrived.

Our new stove had arrived. My mother cooked all morning, preparing for Mr. Bishop's visit. I would hear her downstairs in the kitchen, the clanging of lids on pots, the whir of her Cuisinart, the one my father had surprised her with last Christmas. Then strange smells drifted up to my bedroom. Mr. Bishop liked Italian food. Not the kind we ate at Rossini's in the Village, but another kind with no red sauce or melted cheese. She made him a special rice that required her to stand at the stove and stir it constantly, adding small amounts of warm broth at certain intervals. When I called down in my hoarse voice for ginger ale, she answered, “I can't leave the risotto, Alice!” She roasted pork with sprigs of rosemary that looked like part of the robin's nest outside my window. She sautéed sweetbreads, which were not bread at all but rather the internal organs of some animal. The smells made me gag.

So did the drops of rescue remedy that Mr. Bishop administered. My tongue felt swollen and burned by them. He looked solemn afterward.

“Alice,” he said each time, “you are on the road to recovery. Wait and see.”

Then he'd screw the lid back on the vial and go downstairs where he and my mother ate for hours. I listened to the lilt and murmur of their voices, hating both of them. From my window I watched him leave for the theater, and watched my father walk up our street a few hours later, precisely at
six-thirty. My mother served him leftovers, reheated, and sat at the table smoking cigarettes, watching as he ate.

U
NBELIEVABLY
, I
AWOKE
one morning a week after Mr. Bishop began treating me with the Bach Flower Remedies, cured. I swallowed easily. I spoke clearly. It was a glorious warm day and the sun was bright and yellow in the sky. My mother had already begun making lunch for Mr. Bishop. She sat at the kitchen table hand-grating from a big wheel of stinky cheese. I slipped out unnoticed, my binoculars around my neck and my birding notebook in my hand.

In school I had done an oral report on ornithology. The topic was “My Hobby.” Trini Randall gave a talk on ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging. She had taken a class on it at the Botanical Garden. Felix gave his on collecting bottle caps. He had shown a cigar box painted in splatter paint and filled with bottle caps he found on the streets of our neighborhood. But my report was the best because ornithology really was my hobby and I really had started to love it. Unlike meteorology, ornithology taught useful skills. The skills of observation. The powers of deduction.

“Birdwatching is exciting,” I'd said, “because birds are easy to see, easy to identify, great in numbers and variety, beautiful to observe, and attractive to hear.”

On this May morning, as I walked into Prospect Park, the trill and chirp of various birds filled my ears. I could make out the birds singing each song, the black throated green warbler, the chickadee, and the wood thrush with its
clear, flutelike sound. I stood beneath the blooming trees and lifted my face upward where the birds perched high above me.

Something caught my eye. At first, I thought it was a crow. But then I saw its yellow bill. My mind raced through all the birds I had memorized, alphabetically, the red-eyed vireo and scarlet tanager, the northern cardinal and rose-breasted grosbeak. But it was none of these. I was almost certain that I was looking at a yellow-billed magpie, a bird that did not migrate east. I stood staring up at that bird until my neck ached and my fingers gripping the binoculars grew numb. A yellow-billed magpie, I knew, had no reason to be in Brooklyn, New York.

I recorded my observations in my notebook, then slowly made my way home, imagining how I would call my local birdwatching club and report my discovery. Maybe I would even get on the news with Roger Grimsby. I could see myself in Prospect Park, under the trees, getting interviewed live. I could warn the population of Park Slope about the yellow-billed magpie. With its impressive sweeping tail, it was easy to admire. But like its cousin the crow, it could easily become a pest. Roger Grimsby and all of New York City would be impressed by my knowledge.

At my front door I paused. A small bundle of dried grass lay at the foot of the steps. With my toe I lifted the grass and saw that this was the nest I had watched all these weeks. The smallest slivers of blue eggshell still clung in places. But the birds were gone. They had flown away. Carefully, I picked up the nest, unsure of what else to do, and carried it inside with me.

At the grand staircase that led upstairs, I stood still, listening
to the voices of my mother and Mr. Bishop from somewhere in the house.

“Pine,” he was saying, “to rid you of guilt. Honeysuckle to keep you from living in the past.”

I heard this and understood he had brought her a remedy too.

Since we'd moved in here, the house had smelled of paint and plaster, of cottonseed oil and sawdust. But as I stood holding that nest, the air smelled unfamiliar, like the strange Italian food my mother had been cooking and other unfamiliar smells, things I could not identify.

The excitement of my discovery began to fade. Gently, I placed the nest on the bottom step. These stairs had been covered in dark orange indoor outdoor carpeting when we'd moved in. My parents had spent hours on their hands and knees, removing it from the stairs and marveling at the fine wood beneath it. I could still see the circular motion of my mother's hands as she'd nourished the wood, sanding it, then oiling it, until it gleamed like it did now.

I stepped outside, empty handed, and looked up and down the street, at the brownstones that needed repair, every one of them broken in some way. Nothing looked the same to me. I sat on the stoop and waited. Whether for my mother to come out, or my father to turn the corner, I could not say.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HE AUTHOR WISHES
to thank the Providence Area Writing Group for their comments and suggestions on many of these stories; the editors of the various journals and magazines where the stories first appeared; Yaddo; Marianne Merola and Meg Giles; Gail Hochman; Jill Bialosky; Gloria Hood; Melissa Hood; my husband, Lorne Adrain; and our son, Sam, whose love gives me strength.

More Praise for
An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

“I've been reading and writing for around 65 years now, and how can it be that I've never read anything by—or even heard of—somebody as wonderful as Ann Hood? . . .
An Ornithologist's Guide to Life
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—Carolyn See,
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“Humorous, heartfelt stories. . . . [Hood's] quirky characterization, stylistic intelligence, and adroit timing combine to produce an ending that the reader feels in the gut. . . . A strong, fine collection overall.”

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“[Hood] takes direct aim at failed relationships, sexual betrayals and encounters, death, family secrets, loss, and sudden, often incandescent epiphanies with a deceptively frank and luminous style that sensationalizes nothing but quietly strips away the layers of her troubled and stranded characters. . . . These beautiful tales resonate and shimmer and in their realistic way reveal the way we live now.”

—Sam Coale,
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“Hood's tales are sexy, silly and full of sympathy for trapped creatures of the feathered or human variety.”

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“Hood, author of
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An Ornithologist's Guide to Life
.”

—Margaret Quamme,
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“These stories are simply the way life is, not the way we would like it to be, and reading them is joyous, painful and, finally, exhilarating.”

—Susan Larson,
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“Ann Hood tells 11 sharp, surreal stories in her new collection,
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“Writing with elegant precision, Hood's awareness of place is tactile and familiar, drawing the reader into the scenes with her fumbling characters as they struggle with issues that require both courage and resilience; in the end, each tale uncovers an irrevocable moment of reckoning. . . . As the title intimates, the author is indeed an observer of human behavior, in this case human, not winged. Her protagonists are skillfully arranged for maximum emotional impact, illuminated, exposing the fragile undersides they are vainly trying to protect.”